The history of Ile-Ife is as old as the creation itself, the
reason being that various historians and archaeologists traced the origin of mankind to
Ile-Ife. Along the line, there are little variations in the real account of how the
creation of Ile-Ife came into being, but what is incontrovertible is the preeminence of
Ile-Ife in the history of Yoruba towns and settlements.
In his well researched work titled ‘Ife, cradle of the
Yoruba’ published in 1955, J.A. Ademakinwa, an Ife born historian and teacher believe,
that Ile-Ife was the ‘Land, in the most ancient days where the work of creation took
place, where the dawn of the day was first experienced and the head of the universe’.
Also in his acclaimed book, ���The history of the Yoruba’, Rev. Samuel Johnson, a
controversial christian historian observed that “The origin of the Yoruba nation is
involved in obscurity, and that the Yorubas are said to have spring from Lamurudu, one
of the kings of Mecca whose offspring was Oduduwa, the acclaimed ances-tor of the
Yorubas. He went further to say that “All various tribes of the Yoruba traced their
origin from Oduduwa and the city of Ile-Ife, fabled as the spot where God created man
and from whence they dispersed all over the earth���.
Not only the historians recorded the preeminence of Ile-Ife,
the archaeologists whose sacred duties are to be able to extract historical facts of
origin from the mythical tales of creation also recorded their findings about Ile-Ife.
After extensive field work on Yoruba, the German Archeologist Professor Leo Frobenius,
who visited Ile-Ife in 1910 recorded that Ile-Ife is the probable site of Atlantis, a
legendary Island in the Atlantic to be a powerful kingdom 9.000 years before the birth
of Solomon and its armies had over-run the Mediterranean lands when Athens alone
resisted.
